Sunday, July 9, 2017

Sapolsky book opposes free will

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist professor Jerry Coyne posts one of his usual rants against free will, and then has this exchange with a reader:

As I always say, it’s easier to convince a diehard creationist of the truth of evolution than to convince a diehard atheist of the fact that our behaviors are determined, and that we can’t make alternative choices at a given moment.

Yet there are some enlightened folk who not only accept determinism but deny that a version of “free will” can be confected that preserves our notion of that term while accepting determinism. ...

D. Cameron Harbord: I’m always amazed by evolutionary biologists who evidently believe that we evolved all of that expensive decision-making machinery (in the brain) for no apparent purpose. Humans have devoted large amounts of their time and energy to both individual and collective decision making for at least 10’s, and probably 100´s, of thousands of years. What would be the point of evolving to waste so much time and energy in a deterministic universe? It’s a question that I wish believers in a deterministic universe would provide a satisfactory answer to.

Jerry Coyne: What would be the point? It just happened because some genes that affected rumination and behavior left more copies than others. Not all decision making “machinery” is evolved, of course: some is learned.

With all due respect, I don’t think you have the slightest idea what you’re haranguing about, and you clearly don’t understand evolution.

I have just answered your question in a satisfactory manner.

Harbord: I believe I that I do understand evolution, as I believe that you do also. Genes for “rumination”? The point is that the amount of time and energy spent in decision-making “rumination” (and discussion and argument and investigation) has been significant for modern humans, at least since the time we were living in hunter gatherer bands. It is at least a little mysterious why would evolve to be this way, if you are correct.

But then there is no current finding in physics that establishes the hypothesis of a deterministic universe, so there is no scientific finding that rules out the existence of free will.

Thank you very much for your kind reply.

Coyne: Well. we’ve established that you really don’t understand evolution, as you can’t see any selective advantage to evolving a more complex onboard computer in a social and bipedal animal.

What we’ve also established now is that you don’t understand physics, either. You clearly haven’t read the classical physics that establishes determinism; the laws of physics themselves are evidence for a deterministic universe. That we can land rockets on a comet establishes a deterministic universe, as does the fact that we can predict solar eclipses with great accuracy: to the second.

Do you want to try to misunderstand chemistry as well?

Perhaps Coyne's disbelief in free will explains his rudeness.

First, the physics. Classical physics does not establish determinism. Some of the simplest classical mechanical systems are chaotic, and thus indistinguishable from a nondeterministic system.

Second, the biology. The idea that we have genes for decision-making rumination, but we are never actually able to make decisions, is a little bizarre.

When animals devote a lot of energy to some activity, then there must be some payoff in terms of more or better offspring, or else it is an evolutionary puzzle that begs for an explanation.

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful – all those good things – when people finally accept that there is no free will.

He is a leftist Jewish atheist professor, so that is were he is coming from. Macleans:

I used to be polite and say stuff like I certainly can’t prove there isn’t free will. But no, there’s none. There simply is nothing compatible with a 21st century understanding of how the physical laws of the universe work to have room for some sort of volitional little homunculus crawling around in our heads that takes advice from the biological inputs but at the end of the day goes and makes this independent decision on its own. It’s just not compatible with anything we understand about how biology works. All that free will is, is the biology we don’t understand yet.

My biggest quarrel with these leftist biologists is when they try to tell us about "21st century understanding of how the physical laws of the universe work". There is no such understanding that is contrary to free will.

There is no concept more American than "free will" — the idea that we're all gifted (probably by God) with the power to choose a path of success or destruction and bear responsibility for the resulting consequences. It's the whole reason we "punish" people for committing crimes. The idea is so ubiquitous that most people have never even pondered an alternative.

Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky sees things differently. He's opposed to the concept of "free will." Instead, he believes that our behavior is made up of a complex and chaotic soup of so many factors that it's downright silly to think there's a singular, autonomous "you" calling the shots. He breaks all of this down in his new book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. The tome is a buffet of neurology, philosophy, politics, evolutionary science, anthropology, history, and genetics. At times, its exhaustive in the number of variables considered when looking at human behavior, but that's Sapolsky's whole point: The decisions we make are a result of "prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether [our] parents were authoritative or egalitarian, whether [we] witnessed violence in childhood, when [we] had breakfast..."

Free will is American? They as might as well say it is a white Christian capitalist right-wing concept.

It is funny how non-Christian leftist academics are so opposed to both genetic determinism and to free will.

Update: Sapolsky also says that Religion is a mental illness. He also says Jesus had some mental disorders. I think that doubting free will is a mental illness.

"Final Word: LIGO was all just overhyped noise, like BICEP2. No Nobel 4U! LOL LIGO! In the same way BICEP2 was the smoking gun for inflation, LIGO is the smoking gun for string theory. Too bad inflation & string theory are going up in smoke, alongside LIGO. Sean Carroll’s solution to save the multiverse and string theory? Get rid of falsifiability in science! Keep the billions of dollars flowing so as to destory science and god and philosophy, whence Carroll et al. will reign supreme!

Here’s the final, definitive response to the lame LIGO response:

http://www.nbi.ku.dk/gravitational-waves/gravitational-waves.html

They conclude:

“It would appear that the 7 ms time delay associated with the GW150914 signal is also an intrinsic property of the noise. The purpose in having two independent detectors is precisely to ensure that, after sufficient cleaning, the only genuine correlations between them will be due to gravitational wave effects. The results presented here suggest this level of cleaning has not yet been obtained and that the identification of the GW events needs to be re-evaluated with a more careful consideration of noise properties.”

fig6

LOL LIGO!!

http://www.nbi.ku.dk/gravitational-waves/gravitational-waves.html

We focussed our attention mainly on the first event, GW150914, with special attention to the time lag between the arrival times of the signal at the Hanford and Livingston detectors. In our view, if we are to conclude reliably that this signal is due to a genuine astrophysical event, apart from chance-correlations, there should be no correlation between the “residual” time records from LIGO’s two detectors in Hanford and Livingston. The residual records are defined as the difference between the cleaned records and the best GW template found by LIGO. Residual records should thus be dominated by noise, and they should show no correlations between Hanford and Livingston. Our investigation revealed that these residuals are, in fact, strongly correlated. Moreover, the time delay for these correlations coincides with the 6.9 ms time delay found for the putative GW signal itself.

It is interesting that they need both detectors to even find a data event. I would think that, if the black hole collisions really have such unique signatures, they could find the signature using just one detector. But they cannot.

It would be a lot more convincing if they found the signature data for a black hole collision in one detector, and then used the other detector to confirm the finding. But that is now what they are doing at all.

The LIGO raw data is the correlation between the two detectors. There is no independent confirmation of anything.

Am I wrong about this? The LIGO team acts as if they have independent observations, but if I am right, they really don't. And the residual correlations would seem to prove that they don't.

Supposedly one or two new detectors are being built in Europe, and these could serve as independent confirmation of the data. If so, maybe they should hold up that Nobel Prize until the Europeans can confirm the data.

"I reached out to Salvatore Vitale at MIT who works at LIGO as well to see if the new paper holds any water. “No,” he said, “they screwed up basic things,” listing some specifics of their analysis. The LIGO collaboration ultimately responded via physicist Sean Carroll’s popular blog, Preposterous Universe, in a guest post by postdoctoral physicist Ian Harry, which you can read here."

Then they report:

"Update 6/23/2017 10:21PM: Salvatore Vitale asked us to remove his quotation from the story because he felt the writer was misleading about his intentions when obtaining information over email. We declined due to editorial policy, however the writer regrets this misunderstanding. We offered Vitale an opportunity to provide a statement on the matter. In response to a later query, David Shoemaker, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Spokesperson, got in touch to let us know that there is a very active and productive conversation ongoing between members of the LSC and the NBI group. “We are happy to be able to explain our methods in more detail to the NBI folks, and look forward to making our tutorials clearer on some key points.”"

After all of this "hadwavy confusion/hype/noise," the conclusion is that LIGO is all noise.

Here’s the final, definitive response to the lame LIGO response:

http://www.nbi.ku.dk/gravitational-waves/gravitational-waves.html

They conclude:

“It would appear that the 7 ms time delay associated with the GW150914 signal is also an intrinsic property of the noise. The purpose in having two independent detectors is precisely to ensure that, after sufficient cleaning, the only genuine correlations between them will be due to gravitational wave effects. The results presented here suggest this level of cleaning has not yet been obtained and that the identification of the GW events needs to be re-evaluated with a more careful consideration of noise properties.”

Why is it relevant that the guy is Jewish? Jews often give different answers to traditional "biggie" questions like "Is there an afterlige?" Sort of like what are called Cafeteria Catholics; people who seek to align themselves with an organized faith, but pick/choose only the doctrinal elements they like best.

His Jewishness is relevant because (1) Christians believe in free will, while non-Christians often do not; (2) Jews tend to be big believers in psychiatry and psychology; (3) Jews have a doctrine called tikkun olam; and (4) Jews tend to be leftists, especially academic Jews. Not all Jews, of course. Any discussion of "Humans at Our Best and Worst" usually brings out one's religious beliefs, so I mentioned it as background info. Coyne is also a Jewish atheist professor.

Would it be OK if I cross-posted this article to WriterBeat.com? There is no fee; I'm simply trying to add more content diversity for our community and I enjoyed reading your work. I'll be sure to give you complete credit as the author. If "hOK" please let me know via email.